One of the most frustrating things that still hasn’t gotten any better in the digital age is the ability to view digital media on the family television. Sure there’s AppleTV and SlingCatcher and a host of others, but what about just being able to literally plug in your hard drive or camera that’s loaded with pictures, videos and tunes and start playing it all back instantly? Well, it seems that Western Digital has finally cracked the code with its WD TV Media Player.
I recently put the WD TV Media Player through its paces and it’s not only effortless to get up and running, but it’s affordable, too.
Setup
I literally took the WD TV out of its box, connected it to a power source, connected my spare HDMI cable to the back of it (the other end is already hooked to my HDTV), put the batteries in the included remote, turned it on, and was ready to go.
The media player itself is just a conduit so at this point it only showed the menu since it didn’t contain any content. I then plugged a USB 2.0 hard drive into the back of the WD TV HD Media Player. Unfortunately, it didn’t recognize the hard drive, but it turns out that it was a bad drive, so on a whim I plugged in a random USB stick into my MacBook (I recently collected a ton of them from CES), loaded up some music, videos (in a variety of formats), and photos and then plugged the USB stick into the device. Moments later I was able to view my photos, play my tunes and watch my videos, without missing a beat.
The interface for browsing the media is pretty friendly, immediately sectioning off the various media types. The only drawback I noticed was that if you’re viewing a video and then push the forward button on the remote, there’s no visual confirmation that the command was received, so you push again. Most times you end up accidentally skipping over the desired content, but it’s something that you get used to. You can also use a Slideshow mode, which will then auto-advance your photos, but I prefer to thumb through mine quickly. Since the player is firmware upgradable, I’m expecting some better UI enhancements down the road, including one to deal with this particular issue.
Otherwise, the device itself works perfectly and exactly as you’d expect it to. When I played a song and the song completed, it automatically advanced to the next one. It also showed me the title, artist, etc. of the song that was currently being played.
he coolest feature of the WD TV, though, is that you can plug in a digital camera and start viewing its content immediately. Overall, I couldn’t be happier with the WD TV and recommend it for viewing and listening to your media on your family’s television.
The device can be found in Carrefour and Al-Ghanim Electronics (Rai Branch) selling for below 41.000 KD
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الصراحه انا عجبني الجهاز و طريقع التشغيل و لكن لدي سوال انا احمل ملفات كلمات الاغاني " lyrics " و هي في حال تشغيل الاغنية تظهر كلمات الاغنية و بهذا يمكنك فهم محتوى الاغنية حتى اذا لم تكن تعرف جم كلمة بالاغنية فإن ذلك يشاعد على حفظها ...